I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?"

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

The main reason the ban on marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples has been able to finance a massive advertizing campaign is that the LDS church is bankrolling the entire effort. Up to 40 percent of the financing comes from Mormons, who have also sent countless volunteers to the state to canvass door to door. It's all legal, and totally within their democratic rights, but it is striking that one single religious grouping could invest so much in attempting to strip civil equality from gay couples.

Update: their efforts might not pay off: The LA Times just posted a story that the Public Policy Institute of California released a poll showing that Prop. 8 polls have switched and the polling is now 52% against and 44% in favor.

Tweaking the tax code to shift the enormous tax break President Bush gave to his "base"--earners in the top 2% of the country--to those struggling to put food on the table and send their kids to college.

Republican socialism:

Taking $150,000 of money at a time when your candidate is taking public financing for a presidential election to buy an over-priced new wardrobe for the vice presidential nominee.

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Sarah Palin claims to be an intellectual. And yet:

She can't name a newspaper she reads without three days of research.

She cannot name a single Supreme Court case, other than Roe v. Wade.

She believes that the Earth was formed 6,000 years ago and that Jesus walked with dinosaurs.

When scientists reported that polar bears were endangered, she tried to quash the report because it was another one of those inconvenient truths.

She cannot coherently name the duties of the Vice President of the United States.

If Palin is an intellectual, then George W. Bush is a genius. Oh, wait.......

How Anti-Intellectual Is Palin?

Ramesh Ponnuru asks the question. He refers to Noam Scheiber's devastating piece on Palin's Nixonian hatred of educated elites. But Ponnuru wants more evidence. Here's one way to look at the question: how has Palin brought up her own kids? Her eldest son is a high-school drop-out. Her eldest daughter has had, so far as one can tell from press reports, very uneven attendance in high school, and no plans for college. Her other daughters seem to spend a lot of time traveling the country with their mom at tax-payers' expense. I've seen them at several rallies with the Palins this fall. Are they not in school?

The least one can say is that none of her children seems to have been brought up thinking that college is something to aspire to. And her soon to be son-in-law just dropped out of high school as well.

Sarah Palin's own record of several colleges over several years - ending with a degree in sports journalism - tells you a lot. So does her interest in policing the Wasilla library as mayor and using the town's money for a sports stadium. She cut funding for the town museum and opposed building a new library. So does her amazing ignorance about the constitution. She is, in my judgment, the final rebuke to what Buckley tried to do for conservatism. She is burying it as an intellectual tradition and returning it to the pre-Buckley era. With the eager encouragement of a now Buckley-free National Review. Yes, the karma is overpowering. This is a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare.

In an interview with Daddy Dobson, Sarah Palin describes herself as a "hard-core pro-lifer" and expresses confidence that in spite of disheartening polls, "putting this in God's hands, that the right thing for America will be done at the end of the day on Nov. 4."

She did fine in the interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. If I called you up and said, "What's the Bush Doctrine?," I doubt if you would know what it is. I think you'd probably have a pretty funny answer. She did a great job in those interviews.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there's your new standard: If Imus doesn't know it, then screw it -- the vice president of the United States doesn't need to know it, either.

Bonus lunacy from McCain:

I think she's the most qualified of any that has run recently for vice president, to tell you the truth.

So the numbers - which we already knew were cooked because they don't include people whose unemployment has run out, people who have taken part-time jobs because they can't find full-time work, people who gave up looking for a job altogether, and people who had to take menial labor far beneath their training and previous pay-rate - are actually hopelessly skewed by the inclusion of tens of thoousands of fantasy jobs?

Well, um…yeah. This is the Bush Administration. What did you expect, honesty?

Undisputed evidence shows that Sen. Stevens allowed his wife, a highly-paid Washington, D.C., lawyer, to use his government-paid Senate staff as a personal errand service.

Catherine Stevens used her husband's Senate staff to keep the family checkbook. She used the senator's staff to pay her credit card bills from luxury stores like Saks Fifth Avenue. Catherine Stevens had the senator's staff make runs to an ATM to fetch cash for her. The senator's staff wrapped Christmas gifts for the Stevens, walked the family dog, fed the family cat, cut the family lawn, paid personal parking tickets and handled overdue personal video rental bills.

Much of that help came from someone who reportedly cost U.S. taxpayers $126,000 a year, supposedly to perform official U.S. government business.

Using Senate staff as a household helper is a clear violation of Senate ethics rules, as stated in the Senate Ethics Manual.

After reporters asked for the filed expense reports for her daughters' travel, she changed the report to use phrases such as "First Family attending" and "First Family invited" to explain the girls' attendance.

So much for McCain being Mr. Ethics. But I'm guessing most people realize that McCain gave up any sense of honor months ago.

Another thing, apparently 7 year old Piper Palin conducts official state business in Alaska. She must be one heck of a kid.

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So the Republicans gave Sarah $150,000 for clothes. That's a pretty big gift. And it's a pretty big taxable gift. It doesn't matter if it's for work. And it doesn't matter if the Republicans now say they're going to donate the clothes to charity.

Sarah Palin can't accept $150,000 dollars in goods, use them, then later give them away to charity and not pay taxes on the gift she received. By the time she gives them away to charity, they're used clothes - and worth about 1/3 of their original value. So, sure, she can take a tax deduction on the $50,000 in clothes she's giving away (a savings of perhaps $15k or so), but she still has to pay $50k or so in taxes on the $150,000 gift she received in the first place.

That means Palin will owe $35,000 net in taxes due to her big shopping spree at Neiman Marcus and Saks. And the Republicans can't help her pay for it, or she'll be paying taxes on their help as well.

I would like to thank this bigot for providing such a stark demonstration of the moral foundations of Biblical teachings. For those more moderate (read: less murderous) Christians, this should be a rather shocking wake-up call as to what we could expect if our society were, in all its particulars, biblical.

For all of you who don't believe gays don't face homicidal hatred from decent Christian folk, this should have just rudely ripped the scales from your eyes.

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McNasty's campaign tactics creating joblessness

Literally. A woman in West Virginia and a man in Wisconsin have quit their jobs at call centers rather than read a script that included the message: "Hello, I'm calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the US Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home, and killed Americans."

The Wisconsinite had read negative scripts about Obama before as part of the job, but drew the line at that script, choosing joblessness and a clean conscience over being a purveyor of incendiary lies.

So if the thing that matters most to you is ACORN or Ayers, by all means, watch FNC. But if you care about the economy and the middle class, stay far away.

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"Experts fault Bush's mortgage strategy," Roll Call reports. The president's push to "loosen mortgage loan qualification standards for first-time homebuyers" helped cause the current financial crisis. Bush's efforts to increase homeownership became the core of the "ownership society" that he promoted during his 2004 re-election bid.

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Delusional in Utah

Here's Orrin Hatch yesterday on Fox News:

"There's a lot of jealousy of the United States, especially in Europe, and France in particular and some of the other nations as well. So naturally they're constantly poking holes at the United States. … Yeah there's some irritation with the United States but mainly it's because we're so powerful and strong militarily and economically and otherwise."